Industry News

Google Ads has some new bugs today, one that Google confirmed over advertisers received a notice for "confusing text" for their ads and the other not yet confirmed around advertisers being unable to update their credit cards on file.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Google doesn't say core web vitals are a direct search ranking factor. Google revised its SEO starter guide...

Google's Danny Sullivan said on Friday, "We don't confirm any of the things [page experience or core web vitals] as a direct ranking factor." He added, "But to reiterate we look at many things not one thing and even the one thing might not be a direct ranking factor."

Google might be having some weird bug with XML sitemap files that have hyphens within the final name. So if your sitemap file name is /sitemap-10.xml it will trigger a "couldn't fetch" error, but using /sitemap10.xml with the same exact file will not trigger any errors.

On Friday afternoon, I was able to play a bit with Bing Deep Search, Microsoft's "enhancement" to Bing Search that provides a "deeper and richer exploration of the web." And honestly, my quick impression was that I was not too impressed, mostly because some results were not returned and because it took about a full minute for it to provide results.

As expected, Google has finally released its updated SEO starter guide and it was cut down in a big way. Google said this update was aimed at making it work for someone first getting into SEO and less for an advanced SEO professional.

Microsoft is officially testing a new version of the base model of Copilot (formerly known as Bing Chat), which they code-named Deucalion. Mikhail Parakhin from Microsoft confirmed this over the weekend saying on X, "We are continually improving Microsoft Copilot, testing a new version of the base model in a flight."

A couple of months ago, I documented how some Googlers have been removing some of their old posts (tweets) from X (Twitter). John Mueller from Google didn't really comment on why back then (I asked) but yesterday he finally explained why he keeps removing his old Tweets (Posts) from the platform.

I was recently asked by a colleague to write up our team’s reasoning for using a Now/Next/Later roadmap to plan our work (instead of quarterly/annual roadmaps with dates). If you already use Now/Next/Later nothing in here will be new to you, but I thought I’d share what I wrote for this internal document in case it’s useful to anyone hoping to make this shift as well.

We use an adapted version of a Now/Next/Later roadmap to plan our work. You can read more about this approach in...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...